Defense

A U.S. Air Force flight enroute to Antarctica turned around to New Zealand after being notified of “potentially hazardous” space activity this week. New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority was aware the flight from Christchurch pivoted following the agency’s issue of a Notice to Airmen, or NOTAM, to the aircraft, a CAA spokesperson told Military Times. The Russian Air Traffic Management…

South Korea and the United States will cut short annual joint military drills to five days from 11 and scale back some field training, the allies said on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump ordered a substantial reduction in U.S. participation. The change in the drills comes as Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visits South Korea on Wednesday and Thursday for regional security talks expected to…

China’s Unitree Robotics — among the world’s biggest producers of humanoid and quadruped robots — based designs for its most successful robot dogs on innovations funded by the U.S. military, according to a former U.S. defense technology official and three top researchers involved in the project. Unitree’s $1,600 Go2 model, launched in 2023, helped the company rapidly dominate the global…

As she marked the 14th anniversary of the abduction of her son, Austin Tice, during a 2012 reporting trip to Syria, Debra Tice remained in recovery following her own multi-month health scare. Last October, CNN interviewed a former advisor to ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad who told the outlet that Tice, a veteran Marine Corps captain and freelance reporter, had died in 2013. Debra Tice…